The Doctor Who adventure "Underworld" finds Tom Baker's incarnation of the Doctor, accompanied by Leela (Louise Jameson) and faithful robot dog K9, materializing on a Minyan spaceship, one of two surviving vessels from a world destroyed 100,000 years before. The crew is on a quest to find the lost gene banks of their race, which were placed on a second ship around which a young planet has since formed. In a similar scenario to the previous season's "The Face of Evil," the descendants of the crew of this second ship have degenerated into superstitious primitivism ruled by a malfunctioning computer and, as in so many Doctor Who adventures, including the immediately proceeding "The Sun Makers" (1977), they are dominated by a brutal, self-serving elite.

The Doctor travels to the end of the Universe

The Doctor and his latest traveling compaion Leela find themselves on a ship built by the Minyans a race visted upon by the Time Lords long ago. The Minyans proclaimed them gods and were given such advancements that they destoyed one another. Save for two ships the P7e which held the race banks of the minyan people to start over again and the second sent to find the lost P7E. The Doctor and Leela help those searhing for the ship only to find themselves at the very edge of the universe where planets are made. A strange dicovery that the P7E has become the core of a new found planet and inside the ship's computer has placed itself as a god. Now the Doctor with the minyans has to stop the evil computer calling itself the Oracle from keeping the desendants of the P7E in ignorance and a grip of evil.

"I've waited a long time for this!"

After "The Deadly Assassin", there always seemed to be a story or two in a season that helped fill new Gallifrey/Time Lord continuity. "Underworld" is one of them. Giving us the explanation of the Time Lords' noninvervention with other peoples and planets. That's the interesting bit. The rest is a mix of sloppy extras acting, repeated scenes of guards walking and running up and down and some bad CSO that hadn't been seen since the Pertwee era. There's a neat premise with the Minyons looking for their long lost race bank so their culture and people won't disappear. Their race bank is hidden in the middle of the newly born planet protected by the insane computer, the Oracle. Sounds decent, but it just moves at a snail pace. And besides the interior of the Minyons spaceship, it has a REAL cheap feel to the production. Still, there is some humor to help, and the leads, Baker and Jameson are consistent.

The quest is the quest

I hadn't seen this episode since the mid-80s, so I was pretty eager to lay my hands on it when I discovered the BBC was finally going to put it out on VHS after a slight delay of, oh, 28 years. The few fan reviews I had read were pretty harsh, and my own memories of the episode were very few, but I kept an open mind when I popped the tape in.

My first impression was that this episode had been done a great wrong. It was witty and seemed to have a mysterious and inventive premise. By the time I was finished watching, though, my main feeling was that this was a classic case of a "what might have been" story. Had it been directed by someone who knew how to use close-ups, had the cliffhangers been properly done instead of just happening with the abruptness of a guillotine, had the producers not elected to save a few quid by using horribly fake blue screen backgrounds of the caves instead of going on location as they did for "Revenge of the Cybermen," and had they actually done a second draft on the story, this could have been a real classic. Instead, we have an entertaining but cliche-ridden mess, that takes way too long to move the storyline, stumbles around the plot holes, and then wraps up so fast you have a feeling they forgot to shoot 20 or so minutes of the episode. Call it "enjoyable mediocrity."

The plot has some nice window dressings that conceal a familiar story. Basically, the doctor must battle a demented computer which thinks it is a god, free a bunch of slaves from servitude, re-unite two branches of a race which diverged 100,000 years ago, and try to make amends for being indirectly responsible for the whole mess to begin with. This story was told previously, and much better, in "Face of Evil", and would be told again in "State of Decay." There are other self-plagarisms as well, and to get around these, the writers decided that it would be a good idea to simply not explain a lot of what happens. This works for David Lynch fans, but not for me: they should have added an extra episode, done a re-write and fleshed out what needed to be fleshed, instead of just cobbling this thing together. I'd tell the boys how I felt, but oh yeah, this was shot in 1975. I forgot time machines aren't real. What a nerd!

So now you are thinking I hated it. No, I just had to vent. It is fun, particularly the first two episodes. The villain costumes are creepy, those shield-guns are cool, and the idea of planets forming around stranded ships, the computers becoming the gods of the crews, and the crews eventually turning into slaves of the computers is a fun concept, however many times it has been tried before (and again!). Overall, it is not an episode I would recommend to buy unless you are a hard-core fan, but if you aren't a hard-core fan, why the hell are you reading this?